It can be tempting to try to recruit new employees yourself through online job listing websites or choosing the least expensive recruitment company that you can find. However, this tactic can often backfire, leading to more lost productivity and frustration than if you simply hire the right recruitment agency to start. Here are just some of the reasons why you get what you pay for when hiring a recruitment agency.

Lost in Online Job Search Databases

If your company simply relies on posting available job opportunities on popular job listing websites, your company’s posting will be one of tens of thousands of similar offerings by your competitors. As a result, job seekers will only spend a few seconds reading through all of the opportunities to make a decision on which jobs they’d like to apply for or may even go directly to a respected recruiting agency. Your company’s postings can easily get lost or ignored on these types of websites.

Too Many Unqualified Candidates

Without a reliable recruiting agency to weed through and test job candidates, your company will be forced to waste time trying to find the best candidate in a giant stack of CVs. Many of these candidates won’t have the skills or experience that you’re looking for. An experienced recruiting agency can look through these for you, pre-screen candidates, and save you time by only matching you with what you’re looking for.

Expensive Bad Hires

New hires can be extremely expensive. Not only does your company lose productivity when trying to hire and train them, but if you end up needing to replace them within a short period, you won’t be able to recoup your costs. Consider the value of an experienced recruitment company over the expense of a bad hire.

If your company needs to hire, evaluate your existing hiring processes. Make sure that you have the systems in place to protect your company from bad hires and to find the best candidates. For most companies, regardless of size, it makes the most sense to hire a great recruiting company to do much of the legwork.

This is not a political post. It doesn’t matter whether you hate President Donald Trump or think he’s the freshest breath of air. It doesn’t matter what you think of his politics or the future.

As a business owner, there are a lot of business marketing lessons that you can learn from Donald Trump and his presidency. This post focuses on that. Here are just three of the business marketing lessons you can learn from President Donald Trump.

Diversion

There is some speculation that Donald Trump uses Twitter as a way to distract or divert the attention of the public away from something else. As a business owner, this is a marketing lesson worth learning. You have a lot of control over how your marketing efforts are perceived by using the power of diversion.

For example, let’s assume your company received some negative reviews that you don’t agree with online on your company’s Facebook page. You’re concerned about how the negative attention will impact your company. You could fight with the customer, leaving defensive feedback. However, you know this won’t go well.

Instead, you can create a diversion so new customers stay on the message you want them to see. First, ask your happy customers to leave reviews on your page about their honest experiences, since happy customers are less likely to leave feedback than unhappy ones. Second, create a social media campaign that showcases your favorite customers. This will attract attention away from the negative reviews.

Silence

Something that Donald Trump’s critics and supporters agree upon is that silence would go a long way toward fixing public perception. This is exceptionally true in business.

Do you remember SeaWorld’s initial response to the flack they got from the documentary called Blackfish? The company became offensive and defensive, which aren’t flattering responses.

If the company stayed silent about it instead of trolling the haters, the company might have sustained less damage over the long haul. Any time your company faces adversity, weigh the benefits of changing the conversation, which SeaWorld could have done earlier by focusing more on its conservation efforts earlier, or staying silent.

Clear Messaging

Donald Trump has a casual way of writing that makes it difficult to fully understand what he’s saying. Confefe aside, there’s something to be said about honesty and clarity, as well as using direct langauge. This has been evident with the recent transgender military ban and the previous Muslim ban. Clear messaging would have gone far.

In the case of your company, make sure whatever message you send out is consistent. If your policy is to not give away free sauces, all of your locations need to have the same policy.

If you need help crafting high quality written content, email us directly at info@triassicmedia.com. We’d love to help.

Guest blogging is when you write a post on another person’s website or blog. You write the post directly to their audience, usually with a small biography about you and your company to accompany the post. The posts can accomplish a lot for your business, such as connecting with new readers you’d otherwise have no way of reaching.

How Guest Blogging Benefits You

In most cases, you won’t be paid for guest blogging. However, that’s not the real reason you should write a guest post. There are many tangible benefits of guest blogging that include:

Establishing credibility through expert advice

Reaching new customers

Creating additional backlinks to your website to improve your own SEO

Building key relationships with influencers that can help you grow your brand

These benefits can be leveraged to help you grow your own company or brand’s interests. In general, the more people that become exposed to your offerings, the more people that will buy your products or services. If you don’t have a product or service, the exposure will help others see you as an expert.

Identify Your Goals for Guest Blogging

Before you approach any blog owners, you need to clearly identify your goals for guest blogging so your posts will be as successful as they can be. If you want to establish credibility within your industry, you might want to only approach blogs and websites within your industry. However, if you want to attract customers, you should write posts on sites that your best customers frequent.

Ideally, you should find targeted guest blogging opportunities that closely align with your goals. Blogs open to guest posts want relevant, high quality articles that their visitors enjoy reading. When you know what your goals and markets are, you’ll know what websites to target. For example, if you are a plumber, you may want to look for how-to home improvement websites where potential customers look for plumbing solutions, a plumbing industry website with advice for other professionals, or a blog about people who own service-based businesses. All of these would provide access to a different group of readers that may advance your own strategic goals for guest blogging.

Research Potential Blogs

After you’ve clearly identified your goals and the type of blogs you want to target, it’s important to research potential blogs that might work best. Make a list of sites that you want to research further. Ideally, you want to know if the website is open to guest posts, what kind of posts they publish, the frequency of publishing, and who is in charge of the website. You’ll want to know how to contact them about your guest blogging post to see if they’re interested and to cater your post to meet the needs of their audience.

You also want to research more about the blog’s visitors and the website’s reach. Do visitors leave comments or share posts on their social media pages? Have you checked the site’s Alexa score? A website’s Alexa score reveals how much website traffic any site gets. You don’t need to be the website’s owner to find this out. Check your own website to see what kind of traffic you get and your ranking to compare to the guest posting site. You want to guest post on a website that has more traffic than yours does.

Approach Blog Owners

Even if the blog you want to write a post for doesn’t ordinarily accept guest posts, there’s a chance that you’ll still be able to write a post for them if you can persuade them. Consider the best topics for the site that aren’t currently covered on the blog and that closely fit in with the topic there. You want to establish that you’re very familiar with their content and their audience by selecting the best topic.

Write a well crafted pitch email to the blog’s owner. First, you should compliment their website and make specific comments about the content. For instance, “I love reading the content on [SITE’S NAME]. Recently, I loved the posts titled “RECENT ARTICLE NAME.” Mention how long you’ve read their posts and why you like their content. Then you want to tell them about your idea. Don’t write out the entire post but provide them enough information to know if it would be a good fit on their blog.

Last, you want to make sure that you tell them why you’re the best person to write this post on their site. Let them know about any experience, education, or expertise that you may have. Remember to stay brief and to the point, as you don’t want to waste their time.

Write a High Quality Guest Blog

Your guest post is a direct reflection of you so make sure that it’s of high quality. In most cases, you’ll want to write it in a similar style of what’s currently on the website. If existing posts are written in the third person and use H2 headers, your guest post should, too, unless the blog’s owner asks you to do something else.

Try to provide the most accurate and valuable information in your post that readers want to know. Don’t regurgitate the same type of information that’s found on other websites, although it’s important to do enough research to ensure that your information is correct. The better your article is, the longer it will be up on the site and shared. You may even be asked to write another guest post in the future.

Be Open to Feedback from the Blog Owner

The blog’s owner might want revisions to your guest post to more closely align with their brand. You may not agree with their feedback, but it’s okay. Ultimately, what the blog’s owner wants to post is their decision. You may not understand some of their suggestions, but it’s a good best practice to comply with their requests unless you feel that the changes would misrepresent the message that you want to say.

Drive Traffic to the Post

Try to make your guest post as successful as possible by doing what you can to drive traffic to the post. Plan on sharing the post on your own social media pages to increase traffic to the website. You want your guest post to be the most successful to reach the highest number of people and to have opportunities to write a guest post on other websites. These stats will be important later to showcase their successes.

Interact with Blog Viewers

Readers want to interact with guest post writers. If you see that your guest post gets comments, feel free to respond to them in a professional way. It’s best not to respond to negative comments unless you’ve been asked to. Instead, thank readers for their feedback and provide additional information in your response. You can even answer reader questions. Just make sure to check with the blog’s owner to get their approval before responding to every comment. They may want to be the ones to engage with their readers.

Guest posting is a great way for companies and individuals to expand their audience and establish credibility. If it’s your first time writing a guest post, it can be overwhelming. Use these tips to ensure a smooth campaign.

Keeping your business alive and well takes a lot of energy, effort, and planning. It’s quite frankly exhausting! When you feel that you’re at your wit’s end and that you don’t want to work on your new business anymore, turn to these 10 sources of inspiration to rekindle the love you have for your new business.

1. Talk to Happy Customers

It’s easy to focus on the negative, but at the heart of your business, you provide benefit to your customers. Make it a point to talk to them about their experience with your company. Learn why they love your company and what it does for them. You may be surprised at what you find.

2. Take the Day Off

Nobody can continue to work forever. If you’re feeling especially disillusioned, take off an entire day from working. The world will not implode because you took off 24 hours, we promise.

3. Imagine Going Back to a Day Job

A wise business comrade once reminded me that when you work for someone else, you’re making them money. When you work for yourself, you’re making that profit for yourself. Imagine going back to a day job and what that would be like. It may seem that it would seem easier, but there was a reason you decided to open your business and skip the 9 to 5. Remember why.

4. Invest in Business Training

Whether an ebook, an online course, or an in-person workshop, invest in business training to give yourself a new perspective of your business. It may inspire you to make changes or to deploy new growth strategies.

5. Find a Quality Outsource Provider

When you feel overwhelmed, you might just have too much to do so you separate yourself from your business. Find a quality outsource provider, like the Triassic Media Group, to take over some tasks you don’t need to do yourself. We’ll take care of your marketing, content writing, and website maintenance needs so you have more time for other things.

When you think about the history of personal computing, most people have only had access to laptops and desktop computers in their homes for the past 20 or so years. For senior citizens, many of them never had to learn how to use a computer or to look something up on the internet. As such, it can be difficult for them to understand why website development is such an important aspect of your business.

Here’s how to explain website development to your grandparents.

The Business Directory or Phone Book

Most senior citizens know how important it was to keep a copy of any business directory or phone book that they got, just in case they needed to get in touch with a local business. After all, you never know when you’d need a plumber or a roofer.

Let them know how websites now serve as a phone book of sorts. When prospective customers need a plumber or a roofer, they’d search for one in a search engine like Google. The business’s website is what would show up. Instead of having a single line to let customers know about their services, the business has an unlimited amount of pages.

The First Impression

While many businesses still rely on business cards and brochures as a part of their marketing efforts, a website is a business’s first impression. While a professional, well-written website says a lot about what it would be like to work with a business, a typo-filled website with little content says the opposite.

If you need help creating a professional website, contact the Triassic Media Group at info@triassicmedia.com.

When you first start a business, you aren’t likely to see any profit for 2 years. (Most businesses won’t make profit until this time). Plus, you’ll see an increased amount of expenses. If you quite your full time job to start your business, you’ll have to find a different way to pay your bills and your savings will seem to drain quickly. Even if you kept your job, marketing materials and the sheer costs of growing your business can make it seem like you have no money…ever.

Here are some simple strategies to save money on your new business.

Do It Yourself

Whatever you can do yourself, try to do it yourself. If you need to make cold calls, make them yourself. If you feel that you’re terrible at it, cold calling is a skill you can learn about and practice. If envelopes need to be stuffed, don’t pay your family member to do it. Stuff them on your own.

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to do it yourself. This is when learning a new skill would take up a tremendous amount of time you could use selling or the task requires expertise to complete correctly. Some tasks not worth trying to do it yourself:

Building a Website

Designing a Logo

Writing Website Content

Avoid Lead Generation Scams

You don’t need to pay someone to list your business in an online directory, as you can do this yourself. You also don’t need someone to find your business leads. Finding leads can be extremely simple to do, especially when you first start out. To get your first set of business leads:

Choose Free Alternatives

One of the biggest mistakes that new businesses make is that new business owners choose a high price solution they think they need instead of a free solution. Perhaps they do not know that a free solution is available or that it is somehow inferior to a paid solution. Other times there are free versions available of some of the most popular programs.

If you’re a new business owner, become extremely familiar with the following free programs. They’ll save you money and hassle.

What you write for your crowdfunding campaign has a lot to do with its success. Nobody wants to support some shoddy cause. Here are some ways to have your crowdfunding campaign’s copy stand out.

Invest Time in Great Writing (Headlines + Body Copy)

While word-of-mouth advertising is important to your success, your written copy will be the most widespread communication method. Crowdfunding platforms, commercials, and most other forms of advertising use written copy to convey information. The writing you have done to promote your cause needs to be high-quality. Most people cannot write on the level needed to create effective, high-quality written copy. Invest in finding and hiring someone to do your written copy who has the experience and the skills to do the best job possible.

This is especially true for your crowdfunding platform and other online channels. They have the potential to reach people around the world and convince them to donate without ever talking to you. You want your headlines and body copy to be the highest quality that you can get to ensure your success.

Describe Exactly What the Money Covers

One of the best ways to ensure that people will donate to your campaign is to tell them exactly what their contributions will do. People don’t donate to problems, they invest in your solutions. You have to explain to them how your solution works and how their donations can help you develop it. Many organizations do this by providing a detailed description of their operations detailing what the organization is doing and how it channels donations to facilitate it. If you can show donors how their efforts will help you solve a problem, they are more likely to donate to your cause.

Use Excellent Photos in the Campaign, Reminder Emails, and Social Media

Next to your written copy, your imagery is the strongest method of communication. People often connect more with pictures than they do with written text. So, you want to use powerful and descriptive photos in your marketing efforts. One good picture can be the difference between a successful campaign and a failing campaign.

Social media and reminder emails are great ways of disseminating information through pictures. Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter are exceptional methods of distributing pictures with text that can get donors’ attention. Take advantage of your social media platforms to grow support for you cause by periodically sending updates with eye-catching pictures to get people involved.

How to Promote Your Cause on Social Media

Social media is great for promoting your cause, but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. You want to focus on providing images and text that can draw a viewer in with a positive mindset. You also want to do it in channels with appropriate context. Sending pictures that are off-putting and negatively provocative in the middle of an Instagram feed for funny memes is the wrong context for your advertisements. Instead, focus on using imagery that gets people interested in a positive way in the channels that your target market uses. Tailor your content to your audience so that you are drawing more people in rather than scaring them away.

At Triassic Media Group, we love writing crowdfunding campaigns. Email us at info@triassicmedia.com for a custom quote for your project.

It is entirely possible to find funding for your cause. People generally want to help solve problems, especially your family and friends. If you go about it in the right way, you can easily find the support that you need to raise funds for your cause. Crowdfunding is a valuable source of support, and will likely continue to be a major influence around the world. Here are some ways that you can keep your donors excited about helping you.

Set Clear Goals and Timelines

Supporting a cause is much like any other action that you take in your personal and professional lives. You need clear goals and timelines so that you can efficiently manage your efforts and produce results. Set clear and achievable goals so that you have something to aim for. In a way, it gamifies your efforts by giving you something to achieve. This works for your donors as well. People are more willing to donate if they feel that they can help you achieve a tangible goal. You are most likely to get donations when people see that you are close to reaching your next goal. It helps them see that even though they can’t donate a lot, the little that they can donate will make a big difference in reaching your next goal.

Thank Donors

Donors want to feel involved and appreciated when they contribute to your cause. When a donor sends you money and support, be sure to thank them immediately. A simple thank you note is enough in most cases and has a big effect on whether that donor spreads the word about your campaign. The more positive feedback that you can give donors, the more likely they are to donate higher amounts, donate multiple times, and tell others about it.

Crowdfunding platforms automate this process for you by automatically responding to donations. You can design a thank you note or gift to send to your donors as a way of giving back to them. The message or gift depends on the campaign that you started. If the campaign is focused on creating a product, you might send them one when it is finished. If the cause does not have a tangible product, then a well-designed thank you note is appropriate. The point is that you want them to feel appreciated for helping you.

Keep Thank You “Gifts” Low in Value

Regardless of the size of the campaign or the donations, thank you gifts should have a low monetary value. Expensive gifts cut into your donations and rub donors the wrong way. They don’t want to feel like their donation is used to send people fancy gifts. They want to know that the money goes towards the solution that you presented that convinced them to donate. Simple, thoughtful gifts are the key to creating a successful thank you gift. For example, a heart-shaped gift with a thank you note on it is appropriate for a campaign that is focused on solving heart-related issues. It is easy to find or design a heart-shaped gift that is relatively inexpensive. The fact that you put in the time and effort to create a relevant gift shows donors that you are more focused on the cause then other things.

Take advantage of this growing trend to make the changes in the world that you feel are right. Don’t forget that your family and your friends can be your biggest supporters if you give them the opportunity. Give everyone the opportunity to support your cause by setting up a campaign and spreading the word.

If you want to collect donations for your cause, then you should use one of the popular crowdfunding platforms available online. Crowdfunding platforms make it easy for people to send you money for your cause. Without one, people won’t know where to send the money to. They also help you spread the word about your cause to a wider audience which increases your chances of getting the funding that you need.

In recent years, crowdfunding platforms have made it possible to raise billions-of-dollars for different causes ranging from helping people to creating new products. GoFundMe, Kickstarter, and Patreon are three of the leading platforms, and they each focus on a different type of cause. Here is some information about the most popular options available.

GoFundMe

GoFundMe is likely the leading crowdfunding site for personal causes. If you are looking to find support for a cause like paying medical bills or taking a trip for yourself, then it is the best option. It focuses on the personal cause funding market and has raised billion for these personal projects.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a leading platform for funding creative projects. It doesn’t allow you to fund personal projects, but you can use the funds for developing products or starting your business. It is a great way to get started if you want to make a product that can help people, but you lack the funding to finish its development.

Patreon

Patreon is used mainly for creative work that does not produce a purchasable product. Podcasters and other entertainment creatives use it to fund the development of their shows. It is a great way to find funding without having endorsement deals with major companies. Instead, you can get the funding directly from the people that enjoy your form of entertainment even though it’s on a platform where you cannot charge for it.

There are many other platforms that you can choose from. It’s important to read the fine print about these platforms first. All crowdfunding platforms charge fees for their services. Some charge you while others charge your donors. All of this information should be listed on their site or in documents when you sign up.

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About Triassic Media Group

The Triassic Media Group is a full-service content development and editorial company offering a wide range of services to companies throughout the United States. We only work with other companies, regardless of their size, from start-ups who need editorial support to grow their businesses to very large corporations who need to outsource functions of their own editorial departments. We help clients write website and marketing content, edit documents of any kind, and build or maintain their existing websites. We even offer some photography services throughout the Tampa Bay area to complement our website services.